ALIPAC

It’s not hard to understand that the Right Wing is out of touch, but sometimes it is hard to recognize just how out of touch its leaders really are.

Take, for instance, ISIS, the group of radical militants committing atrocities across Iraq and Syria, recently beheading two American journalists among many others. It’s a scary organization, but to the Right, it’s not as scary as, say, comprehensive immigration reform.

Nor is immigration the only domestic issue the Right thinks bears a resemblance to a vicious foreign threat.

Vic Eliason and Mat Staver last week linked same-sex marriage in the U.S. to the beheadings by ISIS. According to Eliason and Staver, gay rights advocates are destroying morality and biblical values and creating an anything-goes society where people do whatever they need to—killing or beheading—to get what they want, just like ISIS.

What’s terrifying about these comments isn’t that they’re extreme, but that these right wing figures aren’t speaking in a vacuum. Their audience continues to represent an important part of the GOP base, and in some cases these speakers have a direct line to Republican politicians.

As progressives, we can’t ignore this extremism just because it seems disconnected from reality. For the far right, that’s never been an obstacle at all.

According to Pat Buchanan, Obama’s possible executive action on immigration is part of the president’s effort to evolve the United States “from a Western and predominantly Christian country into that multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic, borderless land Teddy Roosevelt inveighed against as nothing but a 'polyglot boarding house for the world. Obama did not like the America we grew up in… How much more diversity can we handle before there is no unity left?”

Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, agrees, saying Wednesday that Obama is using the crisis to enforce a “Third World view” demanding that “not only we allow these people to remain, but [also] suggesting we should start teaching our children Spanish.” This “open-border” attitude, according to Stockman, demonstrates how “Obama devalues the principles upon which this country was established.”

Larry Pratt, head of Gun Owners of America, added to the sentiment saying that the country is going to go “communist” if Democrats are allowed to pass immigration reform. So get ready to “kiss our republic goodbye.”

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, claimed that young migrants escaping gang violence in Central America are lying and we are “being invaded and we’re in danger.” Not only is the immigrant “invasion” dangerous because these undocumented immigrants are responsible for thousands of crimes in Texas, he said, but also because Obama’s immigration policy is the real “war on women” since these immigrants cross the border to rape women.

Gohmert added Friday that he feels victimized by immigration reform proponents because “all these forces against you” are “belittling you, questioning your manhood.” Because comprehensive immigration reform is really about him.

As the news of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s surprising loss last night to Tea Party challenger David Brat sinks in, Brat’s anti-immigrant extremism is increasingly coming into the spotlight. Today Right Wing Watch wrote that Brat actively sought out the endorsement of ALIPAC, an anti-immigrant hate group whose leader has suggested that violence may be necessary to quell President Obama’s supposed war on “white America.” Brat campaigned on the claim that a vote for Cantor was “a vote for amnesty.”

The overwhelming majority of Americans (92 percent of voters, according to a November 2013 poll) think it’s important for elected officials do more to reduce money’s influence on elections — a statistic we often highlight in our work for urgently-needed campaign finance reforms. What last night’s news brings to the foreground is the obvious fact that this 92 percent cannot possibly reflect Americans of only one political leaning. A commitment to fighting corruption and the outsized influence of big money in politics is a deeply-held belief of people of all political stripes, whatever their other beliefs may be.

This morning Politico proclaimed, “Big money couldn’t save Eric Cantor.” And despite Brat’s extremism, there is something hopeful about the fact that people can fight back against the tidal wave of cash flooding our electoral system. To be sure, this outcome is the exception rather than the rule. More than nine times in ten, the better-financed congressional candidate wins. In the post-Citizens United and post-McCutcheon campaign finance landscape, to pretend that money doesn’t matter hugely in the outcome of elections — and in who has access to and influence over politicians once the election is over — is to be willfully blind.

But it’s also important to be reminded that when voters set their minds to it, they still have the power to reshape our nation — for good or ill.